A failure or a Success?

[Segamak]

Which one do you feel he gage falls in to....Sure, 3 million units can't be bad, but at the same time, what about the damage it has done to Nokia's brand?

[Mandark]

If you go to the N-Gage Arena forums and read the keen discussions by quite a lot of people world-wide, it's hard to say that it was a total failure. It just wasn't the success that Nokia hoped for.

The first handset had some poor design issues but it had a lot of features. The second QD handset looked fine. There wasn't good developer support in the end. They were probably concerned with N-Gage sales. I think the price needed to be more like £50 rather than £130, so the kids and parents might choose it over established handhelds.

So overall the pundit and business opinion is that it was a failure and most N-Gages are probably gathering dust. But I've read that Nokia might well have made their money back even if they didn't break into the mobile gaming market successfully. We'll have to see how they do with their second go.

[Owain]

They actually sold about 2million N-Gages I believe. The trouble with the phone model is that you only get a small percentage playing more than a couple of games. So 2 million sounds a lot, but if people played/bought on average 3 games, that's 6 million sales to go between all the games released (at least 30-40 titles? a guess).

The new model is better in that Nokia will sell millions of smartphones. Of course, what it's lost is the decent controls etc. Hopefully they can slip out at least one game-favouring phone, like the SE walkman phone with fire buttons?

[HG VAMPIRE]

It was a big sucess for the whole mobile game industry. nokia did the biggest campaign in mobile entertainment beside jamster for mobile games so it was good.

the consumer who bought the phone downloaded also more mobile games so it was also good for them. the problem beside design issues where the missing distribution network, etc.

[Owain]

The shame is those design issues seems so avoidable. I spoke to company execs at the time, and they just seemed to have this entire blindspot to what they were asking people to do with their phones. If it could have been more phonelike when phone whilst retaining the inherent game capabilities (even if a shade more expensive) we'd be having a different conversation I think. They always needed to get the early adopters with that device, and early adopters werne't turned on by it.

A brave attempt that got a lot right, but might have done so much better.

[splat]

guess we have to wait and see how the software Ngage launch goes in October (or whenever it's posed to happen)

[Owain]

Who is your avatar, splat? He looks like a used car salesman?

[splat]

how dare you talk about about Spiro Agnew, the 39th vice president of the US of A in such a manner